Information Management for Dummies?

Once again, the Left betrays a lack of faith in the individual’s ability to discern between the good and the bad, the healthy and the unhealthy, the wise and the foolish.During a commencement address at Hampton University about a week ago, President Obama blamed the Information Age for a proliferation of pettiness, falsehoods, and lies, telling the crowd that because of the abundance of technology, “information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment.”As a result of so much information being at the disposal of the public, “it is putting new pressures on our country and our democracy.”

Remember, this is coming from the same guy who set up a federal cyber-repository for e-mail addresses and websites that were critical of ObamaCare (under the guise of weeding out misinformation, of course).

Flawed argumentation, emotional appeal, and factual distortion have always baited the desperate, suffering, and ideologically-inclined (hence the Obama Administration).Those willing to reason and be objective, on the other hand, tend to be somewhat inoculated against disinformation—or at least willing to perform a degree of research before buying into anything.

The implication of the speech is this:the problem is not the intellectual laziness and unwillingness of the individual to sift through available information; it is the instantaneous (and unprecedented) accessibility of the information.

No, instead of acknowledging the fact that people choose their own sources, the president inferred that such sources are suppressed, and that people are involuntarily inhibited from acquiring such sources.Hence, the Supreme Court nomination of those who believe in a government-directed redistribution of speech.Hence, the need for government to make decisions for the simplistic population, which cannot separate the wheat from the chaff.

The Internet is one of the last domains untainted by government regulation and influence (and that is debatable).This realm is now being attacked from angles.Whether it is an FCC czar who admires Hugo Chavez’s takeover of the media during an “incredible democratic revolution”, Obama’s nomination of “speech redistributionist” Elena Kagan, or Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller’s suggestion that the danger of the Internet may overwhelm its benefits, free speech lovers have much to fear regarding the administration’s policies regarding the media and information control.

All the while, one does not hear a peep from Keith Olbermann regarding the continuation of NSA wiretapping and the extension of the USA PATRIOT Act, things liberals decried as constitutional trashing under President George W. Bush.